Areins Pelayo

Is there a tension between Émilie du Châtelet’s Law of Continuity (LC) and her belief between absolutely certain and morally certain propositions? In this paper, I argue that ‘no’— there is no tension, since there are at least two interpretative choices that commentators can make. First, they could argue that for Du Châtelet, the LC is restricted in scope and should be applied in the empirical domain only: there is an epistemic gap between the natural, empirical world, whose truths we are only morally certain about, and the abstract, metaphysical world, whose truths we can be absolutely certain about. The other alternative, which I defend here, is the following: interpret Du Châtelet as believing in a psychological formulation of the LC, in which case there is no difference in kind between being absolutely certain and being morally certain—there is only a difference in degree between these two epistemic attitudes. This resolves the tension because insofar as it limits the LC to three domains (rather than one): a geometrical domain, an empirical domain, and a psychological domain, it means that Du Châtelet is not committed— strictly speaking—to a difference in kind between being absolutely and morally certain about some proposition.